Positive Harangues

They spurn alt orthodoxy not just by writing parsable lyrics but
by embracing the now unfashionable label "rock and roll"--and then
providing simple structures, motorvating momentum, and catchy riffs to
go with it.

Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn is a 37-year-old fireplug with a
receding hairline who looks like he might someday perform with pens in
his pocket or put elastic on his black-rimmed glasses so they don't
fly off as he gesticulates around his patch of stage. A beer-swilling
Twin Cities Catholic who attended that Jesuit hotbed of artistic
ferment Boston College, Finn led the excellent '90s Minneapolis
art-punk band Lifter-Puller before immigrating to Brooklyn and forming
the less subcultural Hold Steady with old bandmate Tad Kubler in
2003. For him, punk is roots--his parents were driving him to shows
early in high school. But he always understood its limitations. Once,
he told an interviewer in 2005, a member of the Descendents asked his
posse if they knew any girls who would blow him. "I was like, 'If we
knew that, what would we be doing at a Descendents show?'"

What the Hold Steady share with Lifter-Puller, whose 2001 Soft Rock
double-CD is now a collector's item, is that they resist the
musicianly tendencies of 21st-century indie-rock by charging out words
first. Possessed of a thick, phlegmy voice that barely feigns melody,
Finn is a natural haranguer, and an indiedom given to burying lyrics
that probably make no sense anyway, he's not alone. Think John
Darnielle of the Mountain Goats on the poetry side, Eddie Argos of Art
Brut on the comedy side. Mention irrepressible storyteller Patterson
Hood, whose multi-guitar Drive-By Truckers rarely generate as much
momentum as the lyrics they set off on record and drown out live, and
54-year-old power strummer Ed Hamell, who makes more noise with his
1937 Gibson than four people half his age with a full complement of
amplifiers. Respect godfather Mark E. Smith of the Fall and
acknowledge the related efforts of Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, Woody
Guthrie et al, and dozens of alt-rappers. Haranguers are all over the
place.

None of the above-named lyrics-firsters is anything like
"unmusical." Nevertheless, indie musos have a bead on a truth, which
is that it's easier to listen to music than to lyrics. Live, there's
no choice--if the Drive-By Truckers outpower Hood, how do you suppose
Spoon and Animal Collective treat Britt Daniel and Avey Tare? And in
the home, recorded music has a way of drifting away from the forefront
of consciousness even when you sit down expressly to concentrate. So
however much you love your lyrics-first albums, you don't necessarily
play them that much, with the consequence that they recede from
memory. Some believe this deficit of use value renders Leonard Cohen
lame. I don't, because I'm always drawn to records by some species of
musicality even if it's only timbre and phrasing, and because anyway,
why shouldn't I value lyrics when there are few places I love the
English language more? Still, faded memories are probably one reason
the Hold Steady's fifth album, A Positive Rage, hit me on the
sweet spot.

I didn't get around to the advance I was mailed till after its
April 7 release on the grounds that live albums are for fans only--big
fans, often sentimental, undiscriminating fans. This rule does not
apply to jazz, and there are other exceptions, generally involving
repertoire, improvisation, or death. A Positive Rage, however,
didn't qualify. Commercially and artistically, it's filler--old music
to patch up a release schedule. Eight of the 16 songs Finn and his
boys recorded at Chicago's 1,100-capacity Metro on Halloween of 2006
come from their best-regarded album, Boys and Girls in America,
which they were promoting at the time. Yet it sounded so right when I
finally played it that I packed the CD for a West Coast trip. And when
I stuck it into the slot of my rental car as I followed a friend home
from an East L.A. mole place, I was transported to another plane.

This kind of thing happens to me when I'm driving. For a
Manhattanite who gets around by bike and subway, the getaway cocoon of
a sedan with the windows up and nothing else to do is an ideal
listening environment. There were no tempo or intonation changes in
the banging 30-second guitar-then-keyboard riff of "Stuck Between
Stations," which leads A Positive Rage as it does Boys and
Girls in America, or in Finn's "There are nights when I think that
Sal Paradise was right/Boys and girls in America they have such a sad
time together/Sucking off each other at the demonstrations/Making sure
their makeup's right." But the performance grabbed me so hard that I
didn't mind when Finn swallowed the last word of my favorite line,
losing a slantwise internal rhyme: "She was a really cool kisser and
she wasn't all that strict of a Christian." My mind did wander as the
song moved on to John Berryman jumping into the Mississippi ("He likes
the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration"). But when
Finn launched "The Swish," which I'd heard only at shows since it
surfaced on the band's 2004 debut, Almost Killed Me, I was
delighted all over again by its sub-hip-hop celebrity rhymes: Beverly
Hills/Beverly Sills, Neil Schon/Nina Simone/André Cymone.

The drive home took half an album; Chicano 'hoods more redolent of
Finn's Minnesota than my own proved an excellent setting for his
well-turned tales of adolescent adventure and alt anomie. Yet as I
rediscovered "Barfruit Blues"'s "She said it's great to see you back
in a bar band baby/I said it's great to see you're still in the bars"
and discovered "Ask Her for Aderall"'s "If she asks just tell her that
we opened for the Stones/They're her favorite band except for the
Ramones," the lines that really got me going were the wordless
refrains I sang along with a massed chorus of Halloween
revelers--"Chips Ahoy"'s "Oh-ho-ho ho-ho-uh-ho," "Massive Nights"'s
"Whoa-ho ho-ho-ho." When I checked Almost Killed Me back in New
York, I was struck by how much the band had battened down and muscled
up, even though I already knew Franz Nicolay's keyboards had
transformed the Hold Steady sound on the Catholic quasi-concept album
Separation Sunday in 2005.

Which is to point out that the new haranguers aren't strictly about
words. With the eccentric exception of John Darnielle (who began his
career shouting solo into a cassette recorder, loves death metal, and
chose a Dionne Warwick album as his desert island disc), they spurn
alt orthodoxy not just by writing parsable lyrics but by embracing the
now unfashionable label "rock and roll"--and then providing simple
structures, motorvating momentum, and catchy riffs to go with it. As
Finn boils his mission down in the band-on-the-run DVD that baits A
Positive Rage: "Play good rock and roll and have smart lyrics."
Only unlike the Brill Building masters, these guys don't think they're
required to evoke a microcosm in eighty words or less. They're
verbose, like classic Dylan--or early Bruce Springsteen, who's key
here. Even in the punk-identified Lifter-Puller, Finn's declamatory
run-ons recalled Springsteen, and once Nicolay signed on, a turn
toward E Street grandeur was inevitable. Keyboard flourishes get corny
so quick that I always preferred Separation Sunday to Boys
and Girls in America. But having immersed in A Positive
Rage, I'm not so sure. The fond amusement with which Finn bounces
staccato vocals off big beat firms up the mush. His corn is something
to chew on.

Which is to point out in turn that maybe rousing riffs and
sing-alongs aren't the whole story. Maybe the live-ness of this live
album infuses the music for once. Not every indie band is
self-absorbed, diffident, or standoffish, but in a subculture that
fetishizes the gig, it's odd the way live tracks are relegated to the
limbo of bonus discs and compilation cuts. Showmanship is in such
short supply on this scene that you'd best believe the fan who told
Finn that the Hold Steady and the Drive-By Truckers were the only
bands he'd ever seen smile. I first saw them at a club in May, 2005,
and given Finn's nerdy profile, I was startled by his intensity. Every
night he brayed, "There is so much joy in what we do." By November of
2008, co-headlining with none other than the Drive-By Truckers at
Manhattan's 3,000-capacity Terminal 5, his beat-poet sermons were so
joyous they got a big sweet oaf in front of me to jump up and down and
yell "Fuck Radiohead!"

Having missed the tours in between, I surmise that 2006 was when
Finn--who has said he used to tell the same stories at every show on
the theory that "this is a complete fluke, everyone will forget about
us 10 days from now"--figured out that he'd realized his dream. For
more than a decade he'd written songs about a punk adolescence and a
barfruit career. The characters he chronicled drank and took pills,
scrambled and partied, dug music even if they didn't live for it,
connected and disconnected and made do. Few of them were as arty as
Finn, which is how he liked it, and just because he hung with them
didn't mean they came to his shows. Only then they did--the band had a
buzz and they knew him when. The comment-thread rumor mill spun its
spin. Girls and especially boys in the next circle of hipness found
bits of themselves in his stories, and soon the Hold Steady were
attracting an audience that wasn't too proud to come back for more. So
what you hear on A Positive Rage isn't just a superb repertoire
nailed by a band on the tour of its life. It's a haranguer lifted by
his fans and committed to delivering them, temporarily, from the sad
times they have together. There is so much joy in what he does.

Although there were three albums of new Hold Steady songs between
2004 and 2006 there's been only one since: 2008's Stay
Positive. Do we descry the beginnings of a theme in that title?
Finn wishes. Those lowlife tales you didn't have to be a lowlife to
feel aren't coming so easy anymore. It happens to the successful--even
the moderately successful, which is all the Hold Steady are. So
Stay Positive is long on consequences more consequential than
what records you like. A scenester testifies under oath; a townie goes
to prison; a femme fatale stops popping and starts shooting. Getting
blown proves of little avail as virgins turn into vampires and busted
relationships take on grim detail. Nobody gets up so fast anymore. But
they do get up--that's why you have to stay positive.

A Positive Rage is filler product that signals the
possibility that Finn will succumb to the self-referentiality that
afflicts his calling. But the humane humor and power skepticism of his
harangues signal how hard he'll fight that fate. And the sing-alongs
signal how many believers he has on the other side of the
proscenium.